Sri's Cafe

Thursday, August 24, 2006

Why a Creative Commons License?

I put up a Creative Commons License [http://www.creativecommons.org]] on this blog quite sometime back. I did it in the spirit of the open source movement in computer software (alright, I confess, I did it because I thought it would look good], but it is just now I realize what it truly means.

Copyright generally intends to protect against using the same material and extending it/modifying it. But the GNU came up with the hugely popular GNU Public License (the GPL), that , in a way, allowed the Open Source and Free Software Movements to be so successful. While the GPL and other similar licenses provide a way for use in the software segment, the CreativeCommons license is intended to provide the same benefit to writings, speech, music and other such "artistic" pursuits.

There are multiple varieties of the CC license, but I chose this particular one specifically becuase it allows commercial use of whatever I write. My writing may be YAJB (Yet Another Junk Blog) dotting the blogosphere, but twenty years later, these blogs might be the discovery of the year or something (which would mean that we had reverted to our ancestral abilities!).

Anyway, when someone wants to use it for their own use, I see no reason why it shouldn't be for commercial reasons as long as I get some credti. Too often, I find licenses to restrict "creations" from commercial use, which is contradictory to the "free" and reasonable use of such creations. If someone can make money by using my work, so be it. I can't see any way to make money out of it, so if I get some credit atleast, its fine. Thats also the basis for some of the "really free" (free of cost) software that we get. Many of them are outstanding and are given away simply because the authors feel that it should do some good work.

Ofcourse, since this is also not my professional area, I don't mind. What do you think? If you have any arguments for convincing me to change this, I should be glad to do so.

BTW, Nielsen may be mollified if he sees that I have been doing at least one thing he keeps saying: Links on my blog are the full Hyperlink, not just here and here. These links go nowhere.

In short, there hasn't been anything motivating me to write, so I have kept quiet. Also, I have been kind of busy with some activities that have left me with no time for any online activities. If any readers have good things that you think I should look at, let me know.